Composites structures in a variety of applications may require repair throughout time. For example, airplanes employing a composite fuselage may experience localized need for repair work under service conditions. When the repair area on the airplane is relatively small, the repair may involve bonding techniques in which a composite patch is bonded over the repair area of the skin. However, these bonding techniques may result in the plies being built up beyond the normal skin thickness, thereby altering the cross sectional profile of the skin. Bonded repairs may also result in other variations that may be difficult to control on a repeatable basis. Moreover, bonding techniques may not be suitable for repairing larger areas such as larger areas in a fuselage skin.
Repairs of a larger area on an airplane fuselage may involve cutting away an entire section of the fuselage, and replacing portions of interior stringers and/or frame members along with the outer skin. A large area repair of this type may require extensive engineering analysis in order to precisely determine the area of the fuselage surrounding the repair area that should be cut out. Further engineering may then be needed to design the required repair components. Additionally, the engineering and analysis of the repair may require knowledge of, and access to, a variety of engineering tools, each of which may have a unique user interface, database, visualization capabilities and operating system. Large area repairs of a composite fuselage may therefore be time consuming, labor intensive and require the involvement of multiple specialized experts.
Therefore, it may be desirable to have a system and method that take into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as possibly other issues.